The Alice Hawkins Collection

By Iona Kerstin Volynets

6 September 2025

From July 2009 to June 2010, a team of devoted volunteers at the LeicestHERday Trust gathered 150 interviews of prominent women from Leicestershire. These women ranged from being born in the 1920s to the 1980s and hailed from places as close as Hinckley and as far as Australia or Zimbabwe. The recordings were deposited with the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester & Rutland (ROLLR) and have now been added to the East Midlands Oral History Archive (EMOHA). Through these extensive interviews, it was possible to gather an incredible amount of data and information on the lives of these women. This information serves as a broad overview of the lives of women in Leicestershire in the twentieth century.  

In this blogpost, I would like to share what I have learned about the illustrious, accomplished women featured in the Alice Hawkins Collection.  

The women in the collection were born in a vast array of decades, ranging from 1921 to 1988. Whether they were in their twenties or nineties, they spoke to fascinating life stories.  

Fig 1: Age in the Alice Hawkins Collection (Source: Generated by the author) 

117 of the women were either born in the United Kingdom or did not mention where they were born, with the heavy implication that it was in the United Kingdom. Thus, 33 were born outside of the UK. Seven were from India, four were from Germany, and three were from Kenya, in addition to migrants from places as diverse as Latvia, Egypt, Canada, Iran, and Zimbabwe. 

Fig 2: Birth country in the Alice Hawkins Collection (Source: Generated by the author) 

The collection also featured a highly educated subset of women. This is likely due to the fact that the collection sought to share the stories of significant women in Leicestershire, a feat which can have a bias towards jobs that most often require degrees, like working in the voluntary sector, founding a business, or working in local or national government. Nonetheless, many women did not report education past secondary school or did not mention their education at all, still making incredible contributions to Leicestershire.  

Fig 3: Education in the Alice Hawkins Collection (Source: Generated by the author) 

Only 14 of 150 reported coming from rural areas, and only 11 identified as being working class or experiencing poverty. This is certainly not representative of Leicestershire at large.  

Even though many of these women were born in a time that encouraged women to stay at home, rather than seek employment, in 121 of the interviews, “work” as identified as a central theme or keyword. Only 4 of the 150 women mentioned no form of employment at all. 117 of the women worked either as teachers, in business, in the voluntary sector, or in the local government. However, there was a vast diversity of careers, including an Olympic athlete and two priests.  

Fig 4: ‘Work’ as a central theme of interviews in the Alice Hawkins Collection (Source: Generated by the author) 

Fig 5: Employment in the Alice Hawkins Collection (Source: Generated by the author) 

Unsurprisingly, a vast majority of women had been married at some point. While only 85 reported being married once and staying married, 124 mentioned having been married or having children at some point, with many divorced, widowed, or remarried. Only one interviewee identified as LGBT+, stating that she was unmarried but had a longtime lesbian partner.  

Fig 6: Marriage in the Alice Hawkins Collection (Source: Generated by the author) 

While cataloguing interviews, I assigned five key themes per interview, from a pre-set list of words universal to all EMOHA interview cataloguing. These interviews were vastly diverse, with 35 themes featured across all interviews ranging from fashion to war to government to religion to arts to disability to migration to education. “Family” and “work” were the only themes featured in a majority of interviews, while “women” and “education” were featured in almost half.  

Fig 7: Key themes in the Alice Hawkins Collection (Source: Generated by the author) 

This collection is available to be listened to at the ROLLR, where it has the reference DE7965, and at the EMOHA where it has the reference EMOHA/137. At the time of writing, it is not on the EMOHA catalogue but we hope to add it to the catalogue before the end of 2025.